This upcoming week at Toastmasters we have our Club Table Topics and Humorous Speech Contest. Originally it was so hard to get people to sign up as contestants and I even threw myself in as a contestant hoping to get the ball rolling. So now I am participating in the Table Topics contest and we have over 14 contestants between the two contests. Oh, of course some may drop out as they realize there’s no time to prepare a speech and such, but overall that’s still a good number!

I also need to get going on my regular speech projects again as I’ve only completed three and I’ve told myself I will have my CC and CL status by the end of the executive year. That means I have to do at least seven more speeches to get the CC and a few other projects for the CL as well. Writing a speech isn’t really a big deal for me, not really. It’s more about the topic to choose – what can I write a speech about that will keep others interested?

On the web side of things, I’m doing another set of demos for our hockey pool website, PickupHockey.com. The downside is I’m terribly equipped in the audio department, so my next mission is to excellently equip myself and do those demos again, with better audio. I’d also like to find a way to make them more interesting, cause they’re pretty boring to watch. There’s got to be a way of doing them in a more captivating and fun way.

With the return of Autumn, comes the return of more time indoors – meaning that hopefully more work will get done. Despite the increased time indoors, I really do love Fall. Today I went for a bike ride around Stanley Park and what a lovely Autumn day it was. With that, I leave you with a photo of Siwash Rock along the Stanley Park Seawall.

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As for Toastmasters, my first month as Club President has been okay however since it is summer we have some difficulties filling all the roles every meeting since many members go on vacation or would probably rather be outside in the nice weather. Once September hits I think the club activity will pick up again, which will be nice – and then I can really start pushing our goal for President’s Distinguished Club.

If you live on the internet as I do most of the time, you may have heard that web developers and designers of all kinds are finally fed up and cannot stay quiet anymore on the subject of Internet Explorer 6. Enough is enough!!! If you agree I suggest you join the campaign by adding an anti-IE6 icon to your online profile pictures in the very least (I’ve used mine on my twitter account). Here is an anti-IE6 image for your convenience in a large size so that you can scale it down to the size needed for your image.

Also, see below my example:

– Rebekah

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All things considered, I think it went very well and I managed to write it and mostly memorize it in two days. I truly think I inspired the club and that we really are going to achieve what I want us to.

Blog post on how to write an inspiring speech coming soon.

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“Today’s table topics session is a lesson in how your body language speaks and to help you see how both speaking effectively and using your body effectively works together to make you an even better public speaker.“

The exercise included two people per scenario as one person will only be speaking, and the other will only be doing the actions to go with their partner’s speaking. This helped give a more apparent demonstration of how the body speaks and how both speaking and moving have to work together in order to make a speech truly effective. Extreme hilarity ensued with the following scenarios:

• 1. You are working on street repair and discover an indecipherable item.
• 2. You are at a local dance and meet a strange, interesting character. What happens?
• 3. You are wrestling a bear at the state fair. What is the outcome?
• 4. You are rock climbing in the middle of a hot day and are suddenly swarmed by a large number of birds.
• 5. You are demonstrating Tupperware (or some other product of your choice) and describing the strange things it is useful for (not just food).

Needless to say it was difficult for some people to not use their body while speaking (using hand gestures, etc.) and for others it was difficult to not speak or make too many noises. At the end of it all my eyes were watering from laughing so hard. Definitely a great exercise that I would do again some time.

- – Rebekah

P.S. Nam (our Past President, a super cool dude) introduced me as the Table Topics Master and used hockey references to Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby. NICE. I love it. You can put me up there with great achievers any day!

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That’s right. Club elections took place, and I will be the new Club President for Burrard Toastmasters. Because that’s just how I roll, and because I’m freakin’ awesome. I actually don’t officially become Club President until July as we go through a transitional period and a training session. The point is I’m progressing in my usual pace again, yay! That’s all I have to say about Toastmasters today.

This week’s handy links:

• • 10 useful tools for choosing the right color palette
• • 5 must know web design polishing techniques
• • 50 ways to become a better designer
• • 10 Wordpress plugins guaranteed to save you time
• • 22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques
• • Designers predict web design trends for 2010

–Rebekah

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I finished the flash book Leigh had ordered for me, and the satisfying part of it is that I knew about 98% of what it taught. My first project is going to be a Netgenetix social photo gallery which Leigh wants me to treat as a real project with a project brief, a timeline, and deliverables. That should be interesting in terms of the timeline/deliverables, only because I’ll be working on it in my free time, not on a daily basis like a client project. Who knows what client work may fill up my time in the coming weeks?

I’ve come across some awesome design/development articles and pages in the past week that I’d like to share. Take a gander, I’m sure you’ll find at least one of them useful or inspiring!

• • Create an Image Rotator with CSS/jQuery
• • 40 Tutorials for Creating Highly Detailed Icons
• • 26 Horizontal Websites for Inspiration
• • 20+ Brilliant List Styling Techniques
• • Meagan Fisher – An Inspiring Designer
• • The World’s Largest Free Textures Site
• • Run Several Versions of IE on your PC

… and you can see more of my cool website discoveries by following me on Delicious.

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It was actually fun and not hard at all – there’s a leader in me somewhere! I also did my first table topic tonight, which is the part of the meeting I’m always most worried about – so the fact that I nailed that was pretty awesome. I had several people at the meeting today say that I’m a natural and I should run for Club President. Could be a good idea for sure… I’m gonna talk to Jess about it and see what she thinks.  Plus, it would be cool to have her as the Past President to help me out.

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This week I did the word of the day and the language evaluation. I have to admit when I was trying to think of an uncommonly used word the first one that came to mind was  “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. Yes, its in the dictionary! However, that word is a bit silly, and as Justin mentioned, I didn’t want to make people hate me. So instead I chose the word “flabbergasted” cause its a fun word and its not often used. I have to say though, compared to previous meetings, everyone was good at attempting to use the word. Woot. 1 point Bekah.

Also, Jess did a last minute speech which she threw together in something like 20 minutes (or less!) for tonight’s meeting. She talked about interviews and what you can do to have a better shot at getting a job offer after leaving an interview and feeling good about any interviews you have – without feeling like you could have done better after you leave. And, of course, it was nothing short of amazing. I don’t think there will ever be a day when she doesn’t amaze me with her abilities and skills…

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As for Netgenetix these days…

The boss is having me learn flash… that’s gonna be awesome. I know the basics and a decent amount of AS3 from school but I never got into it much at that time. So I got a book and have been doing some self-teaching but its a bit slow right now with how busy I’ve been… however I’ll hopefully be starting a class for it in the fall probably. I’m actually pretty excited… I’ve always had super good ideas for things that could happen in flash but obviously don’t have the patience for the design part of it (as usual)… but once I get good at it and I’ve got Justin to design stuff before hand, then that will be pretty sweet.

Also, I’ve been wanting to write a few more new blog entries for Citrus however haven’t had much of a chance lately. If anyone has any good ideas or things for me to write on regarding SEO please share! (Anything you’d like to know?)

Oh! And the NHL Playoffs started today! How exciting! Yay for the Canucks first win against the Blues! This means an overload of support emails on our free hockey pool website, PickupHockey.com. I’ve been helping out with these support emails a lot over the last couple days and I’m not sure what it is about them… but I’m ADDICTED! I dunno what it is, but I’m addicted to replying support emails and doing so as soon as humanly possible! It’s actually pretty exciting, Pickup Hockey is growing so much and it’s freaking awesome… I’m not sure what it is but I love watching the number of registrations and daily visits continue to climb. I’m proud to say I contribute to keeping one of the biggest hockey pool websites on the internet alive and well!!!

Anywho, that’s enough rambling for one night. Later!

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Good evening fellow toastmasters and most welcome guests,

If you were to ask anyone who knows me to describe me in one word, I have no doubts that word would be “happy”. I find that being overly cheerful comes quite naturally to me, and I’ve never really known anything different. Some people might say it’s because I haven’t been jaded yet or I haven’t been through enough hardships to be bitter about life and its many challenges. However I honestly don’t think it has much to do with that. What I’d like to share with you are the things that keep me so upbeat and cheerful every single day.

Firstly, I have a great many interests and dreams; as most people do. The joy in each of my interests in some form ultimately finds me in some way or another each day. Whether it be listening to the tunes from my favourite musical, Hairspray, or uncovering a great piece of design which often comes from a certain colleague or old classmates. It doesn’t stop there either, I find simple happiness just from dreaming about the travels I hope to have one day, to experience the world I haven’t had a chance to see yet. It all begins when I wake up in the morning to my favourite radio DJ’s, with their upbeat tunes, and their silly banter, I can wake up happy, and then be ready to start my day.

I find that work keeps me happy too. To some, this might seem crazy. Yes, work makes me happy. What a notion, I know! Even back in the day when I used to be the opening manager of McDonald’s, getting up at 4:30am to go and make eggs and get yelled at in the drive-thru. The truth is, being cranky and working at McDonalds at 5am doesn’t really get you anywhere. So I found ways to keep me happy – singing and dancing while you’re making Egg McMuffins helps A LOT, although it does get you some weird looks.

Now, I work as a Production Assistant, for a web development company, and it doesn’t require singing and dancing to keep me happy. I just simply love what I do and I love the people that I work with; I see something amazing in each of them, just the chemistry that we have together is what makes me happy. In all honesty, even though work is tiring, I don’t know what I would do with myself in all that free time or if I would be nearly as happy without being able to go to work everyday and see all the people I enjoy spending time with.

Another thing that makes me happy is just singing and dancing in general, neither of which I do well, I might add. A lot of people don’t know this about me, but when I’m walking to and from work, I mouth the words to my favourite tunes and even bust a move once in a while, especially if I’m walking up Lonsdale Ave from the Seabus. Yeah, strangers probably think I’m weird (and you probably do too), but it makes me happy and that’s all that matters. Singing isn’t something I do out loud in public very often, however I love to sing, I just wouldn’t subject other people to the painful sound of my voice. Although I’m probably sure that people in my apartment building have heard me belting it at least once or twice to the melody of “You Can’t Stop the Beat”.

There’s a phrase I often use with my friends as we get older. Have you ever heard of being “maturely immature”? As we get older, we get more and more mature, or as some people put it, more serious. Serious? I just don’t do serious… unless it’s absolutely necessary. Sometimes to remember that not all things have to be taken so seriously we need to have our childlike immature moments. This is how I describe “maturely immature”, and it’s what I tend to be a lot. If something makes you feel like you wanna laugh, why hold it back? As some others say, “Growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional.”

There are so many factors in my day to day life that keep me cheerful, so many, in fact that I can’t begin to think of all of them. Maybe, most of all, its just that I enjoy being happy and being a positive happy influence on the people around me. I hope that today, not only have you learned a few crazy things about me, but that you have also been able to take a piece of my happiness and add it into the recipe that is your life, to make the flavor just that much better.

And remember, it will always take more muscles to frown, than it does to smile.

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Wish me luck! Hopefully I can get through it without coughing up a lung or an extremely stuffy nose altering my voice!

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Unfortunately due to the fact that all prepared speech spots are filled for the next 2.5 months I had to sign up for my Ice Breaker (the first speech) a lot sooner than I wanted to. A lot sooner. So, as fate would have it, I have my first prepared speech a week from today.

The first speech you do at Toastmasters (aka the Ice Breaker) is about yourself – I guess because its the easiest subject. I’ve got about 3 minutes so far of the 4-6 minutes needed and it sounds way too cheezy for my liking. I’m my own worst critic, I know. I’ve also discovered I need to speak slower in general cause I talk too fast. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll also see if my colleagues decide to randomly show up, I don’t think I’d mind if they did actually… maybe because I’m still so new to it that I can use the very excuse that I’m new to it, haha.

Until next week, later!

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Okay, seriously? Toastmasters is a public speaking group. I keep thinking that I could SO do this and that I have more confidence in front of other people than I actually do and then when I finally have to speak I’ll wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Anyway I’ll see how it goes. I could use a little more confidence in myself and it will be good for meeting new people as well as speaking in meetings or on the phone with clients for work. I’m hoping it will improve my listening skills too – my mind tends to wander a little too much in some meetings. In any case, I shall keep updating on my experiences at Toastmasters – I think it will be awesome!

No turning back, full speed ahead! *quiet humming* (I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain, I have confidence that spring will come again, but most of all you see, I have confidence in ME!)

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